WotSSoM: Updated Card Game Rules

You can see I’ve updated the “player powers” for my card game, War of the Seven States of Magic. “Player Powers” is a deliberately vague term referring to “what a player is allowed to do at any given time.” You’ll notice the powers are considerably more detailed than previous incarnations, and this is intentional.

At some point in the near future I hope to update with a page of basic terminology, clarifications, answers to “frequently asked questions” to go along with the game rules. The idea is to keep the rules of the game and their explanations to only a couple pages of text (all in an easily readable type size).

Basically, a rule book.

I’m using a couple different methods to determine basic card effects for the game, and I’m trying to determine an initial “basic game” set of cards to begin testing and eventually commission art for – it’s my hope to have something to send to a printer before the end of 2013, but that depends on lots of things that are out of my hands.

Still, I can dream, right?

Most of what I have right now are ways to tweak and upset basic functions of the rules, like preventing a player from recycling their cards at the end of their turn, preventing a particular card from being reserved, that sort of thing. Little blocks and time-wasters to take control and gain momentum.

I want to avoid “rules bloat” – that occurs whenever new rules are added to a game, and in this case I’m referring almost exclusively to “exceptions” that normally crop up whenever the new rules don’t work the way they’re supposed to, and clarifications have to be explicitly made. I don’t like those. They lack elegance.

What I would much prefer is a “front loaded” rule set that established the game’s concepts in a clear and straightforward manner, where new rules work within the existing framework, “bending” the rules instead of “breaking” them.